Thursday 18 May 2017

TV Times 20th May 1967

A selection of articles and adverts from TV Times for the week beginning 20th May 1967.

Lanning at Large - Up With The Cup!



It's FA Cup Final week and ITV are covering it - Tottenham Hotspurs and Chelsea. The BBC will be broadcasting the match too. Not many club matches were broadcast on television at all as there were still concerns about match attendance numbers. But the FA Cup Final provides the choice of both BBC and ITV's coverage! Dave Lanning's Lanning at Large segment is a regular feature of TV Times and this week he has been to visit the FA Cup trophy.

The location of the cup is top secret so he starts to feel as though he has stepped into a clandestine world. The World Cup was stolen in Britain the previous year so 'big-time soccer is understandably jumpy about its silverware'. Lanning writes, 'no official is permitted to be photographed with the Cup' but fortunately he is not an official and a cheery photo accompanies the article.


Nonetheless, he describes the cup in detail. 'The end of the rainbow is 19in. high, 10in. wide, and weighs 175oz'. For those of you who only do metric, that is 48.26cm high, 25.4cm wide, and just under 5kg. As the cup weighs 11 pounds, Lanning reckons that must be why the players all pass it around so much in the victory lap - 'it gets to be quite a weight for one man to carry for a whole lap, particularly after 90 minutes of flat out football'.  One oddity of the article, and indeed for others of this period, is the interchanging use of 'football' and 'soccer', as we now usually regard the latter as an American word.

Among the facts we learn is the Cup is the third trophy for the FA Cup. The first was stolen in 1895 and the second withdrawn in 1910 after it was found to have been duplicated. Lanning is shocked at the low value of the cup - it is insured for £300, around £5000 today. For scrap silver, it would fetch about £75 (£1250 today). No small sum but perhaps not enough for a cup 'kings, queens, legendary soccer skippers have held'. This trophy would be retired in 1991, after becoming too fragile.

We also learn that 'in 1955 Newcastle's jubilant players, about to swig the celebratory champers, found a set of false teeth in the bottom' and 'in 1964 West Ham startled soccer by drinking milk from the Cup'.

I won't spoil the score because you can watch six minutes of highlights below, courtesy of British Pathé. A 'faces in the crowd' section at half time makes it well worth it. Also look out for Tottenham captain, Dave Mackay, kissing goalkeeper, Pat Jennings.


Firstimers!


Granada is launching a new programme showcasing talent from the North. It will be a 'nightly three-minute showcase for newcomers'.


First up on Monday is 13-year-old Kathy Jones. The commentator helpfully tells us 'I hate this song' though admits her version 'makes it sound most attractive'. Kathy Jones would later play Tricia Hopkins in Coronation Street from 1973-6 and present A Handful of Songs in 1973.

Two Yorkshire lads, Lenny Westley and Danny Clarke, form Foggy Dew-o. They would release two albums the following year but Lenny then went into hospital with a rare lung disease. Some time after his recovery they started up again and lasted several more years before disbanding in 1973. Fun fact: Danny's real name was Granville.

Jazz-blues seven-piece, (The) John Evan Band, are set to be the most successful as they are the forerunners to Jethro Tull. Ian Anderson gets a credit as 'the composer and bearded vocalist'.

I was unable to find out any information about either Bill Brennan or The Cumbrian Folk so one presumes they found little long-term success from their 15 minutes of fame. This is a shame as I would have liked to have found out more about Bill, 'a contact lens consultant'.

Cliff!


Cliff Richard gets a full page colour photo to tell us his series, Cliff!, is back on Wednesday. We are told little about it with TV Times seeing fit only to give us the most vital information: 'there will be 14 girls - three singers and 11 dancers'.


Armchair Theatre: The Snares of Death



This play starring Richard O'Calloghan and Alfred Burke is described as a black comedy. Set in 1919, it depicts an undertaker in a small town. There are only so many people in a small town and apparently not enough of them are dying so the undertaker (Burke) 'plots a way out of his troubles with a forged death certificate'. Intriguingly, 'the plan takes a macabre twist when Rupert (Callaghan) decides to elaborate on the scheme'.


The other Richard O'Calloghan play alluded to in this preview is The Division, which goes out on Thursday. The Armchair Theatre previews in TV Times are often excellent like this. An increasingly frustrating problem presented here is finding out the episodes exist but are not released on DVD. However, we can present a colour photo of Alfred Burke printed in TV Times. This would often be the only way of seeing stars in colour. When I was watching Public Eye and first reached the colour episodes I was shocked to discover Alfred Burke had blonde hair as I had always presumed it to be dark! There are also a couple of colour photos from the set of 'The Snares of Death'.





Susan Maughan - Ideal Traveller


A singer, Susan Maughan enjoyed success throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Her column in TV Times usually specifically addresses women and contains fashion, make-up and housekeeping advice. What else could a lady want... Here, she informs us 'a housecoat is a must'.


Do It Yourself - Tampax Tampons


The crux of this advert seems to be that if you can put up a bookcase then you can insert a tampon. What baffles me is it seems to imply someone else was doing both of these things before.

Russian Cameras and Radios


I love that the advert includes a map to show readers where Russia is but fail to label the UK on the map. 'from RUSSIA - the nation that photographed the MOON!' 'DON'T BE CONFUSED BY IMITATIONS! MAKE NO MISTAKE - OURS IS RUSSIAN!' I have some doubts about the Soviet Union's technological prowess in consumer goods. An item described as 'AN IRON CURTAIN MIRACLE!' and 'NOT JUST A RADIO BUT TECHNOLOGICAL MAGIC!' just doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence in me.


These are part of a full page advert from a mail order company, Headquarter & General Supplies, which is quite possibly the blandest name for a company ever invented. In fact, it sounds like a cover name along the lines of James Bond's Universal Exports. Whilst looking them up I ended up on a couple of dodgy websites so I am still not convinced of their legitimacy. However, they did exist and eventually had a number of physical stores before going bust in the 1970s.

Levi's


This is far from the sexiest of ads for Levi's but is probably the most badly illustrated.